PLATFORM: Nintendo Wii
DEVELOPER: Nintendo EAD
PUBLISHER: Nintendo

The Nintendo Wii is a tyrannical government’s dream. There seems to be one of these innocent white boxes in every household, each one monitoring the populous’ recreational activities, and everyone is none the wiser, hypnotised by the little white box, utterly compelled to do Nintendo’s bidding. Now Nintendo take one step closer to relegating George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to the status of ‘instruction manual’, releasing Wii Sports Resort, the sequel to the mandatory Wii Sports, bundled with their new hardware, the Wii MotionPlus.

Wii Sports Resort relocates the humdrum of sporting in the city to Wuhu Island, a utopian island where Miis congregate to partake in competitive sport and wear fruity shirts, unbeknownst to the fact that there is a dark power watching over them, using them as mere playthings, like a puppeteer controlling a marionette. But here’s the M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist behind it all. The dark power is actually…YOU, the player!

I may have made up a few things in that last paragraph. In reality, Wii Sports Resort is simply 12 summer-resort themed sport minigames such as Swordfighting, Water-skiing and Frisbee^® (I think it’s pronounced Fris-beer). But that description’s somewhat plain and boring. Just like the Wii itself [/troll] or your garden variety Nickelback album.

The big thing about Wii Sports Resort is not the new sports or the piles of money Nintendo will make out of this game (although those piles of money will be huge). No, the big thing to come out of Wii Sports Resort is the Wii MotionPlus, a little dongle that attaches to the bottom of the Wii Remote which uses Nerd Magick™ to make the whole thing track your every movement more accurately. Your every movement. If such technology were to land in the hands of evildoers, then we’d have something to worry about. However, it’s Nintendo who have this technology.

Oh God!

In reality, the difference in precision is actually noticeable. When you boot up Wii Sports Resort for the first time, you’re forced to play a skydiving game. As your character falls down, a Wii Remote is superimposed on top of it, and as you move the remote around, your character does almost exactly the same. It really shows off how accurate the Wii MotionPlus can be.

That’s great and all, but really, what’s really important is whether this device makes the games more fun or not, and on that level, the results are kind of mixed. For the most part, the MotionPlus does enhance the gameplay, and even enables you to play some games that wouldn’t have been possible with the gross imprecision of the vanilla Wii Remote.

Just look at Wii Sports Resort’s centrepiece: Swordfighting. As you move the remote in real life, it’s being reflected on an almost 1:1 basis on the screen. Naturally, this makes the Swordfighting game really fun; definitely more fun than past attempts at this which boil down to extreme waggling, although Swordfighting does come awfully close to turning into an epileptic fisting contest at times.

Some of the other games also use the MotionPlus to great effect, even if it’s not as blatantly obvious. Games like archery, Frisbeer and the rehashes from the original Wii Sports (Golf, Bowling and [Table] Tennis) are all various varieties of fun. Although with these mulligans, there is a lingering feeling that these games have been done before, and done rather well without the benefit of the MotionPlus.

Then there are the games which feel like filler and flotsam, diluting the pool of quality with the creeping yellow substance otherwise known as mediocrity (I’m a writer!). Take Basketball. Theoretically, your shot accuracy should depend on the twist in your wrist, the power of your shot and your jump-shot technique. In reality, it feels like the accuracy actually depends on what you had for lunch, the current political situation in Bolivia and how the Wii is feeling at the time. And even then it’ll come down to a die roll. But blame also has to go to poor game design. Jet Skiing, for example, feels incredibly slow, and the courses are incredibly boring; not at all like the Wave Race 64 successor everyone was hoping for.

And then there are the downright terrible games, which are undeniably there to make up the numbers. They are completely abstracted from any definition of reality or fun. The aeroplanes in the Airsports minigame control more like a spoonful of baby food than anything remotely resembling a plane. Cycling feels exactly like controlling a bike, especially the part where you pedal with your arms, but even then it feels like performing a really boring drum solo (a tautology if I ever heard one). And remember how I mentioned the borderline waggle-fest that was Swordfighting? Well that’s literally the objective in Wakeboarding.

It’s these latter games which really highlight my main problem with Wii Sports Resort: missed potential. What made the original Wii Sports so fun and fundamental to the Wii was that it managed to be really fun whilst showcasing what the Wii Remote could do. Wii Sports Resort is supposed to do the same for the MotionPlus. However, only Swordfighting really shows off the MotionPlus’ potential. Apart from that and the rehashes of the original’s games, there’s not else that justifies this new piece of hardware (apart from the feeling that you’re now officially technologically superior to the luddites and Proles that surround you). We can only hope that some third party developers will go further with the MotionPlus than Nintendo have done with this game.

That’s not to detract from the moments of fun that are to be had in Wii Sports Resort. Like I said earlier, half the sports in this mixtape are actually really fun, and pleasantly enough, there’s even some depth and variety to be had. Each of the sports carries with them a couple of variations. The highlight of this is, once again, Swordfighting, which apart from the duelling also contains a ‘Speed Slice’ mode which is all about reaction time. But the best part of Swordfighting, and quite possibly all of Wii Sports Resort, is the ‘Showdown’ mode, a single player game where the aim is to cut – or, perhaps, fist– your way through a horde of Miis swarming towards you. But again, this only applies to half the sports. The variations for this other half merely transform them from particularly boring games into particularly tedious games.

It would’ve been easy to be cynical about the release of Wii Sports Resort. Nintendo could have simply cobbled together some random art assets, duct taped them with MotionPlussed waggle and offloaded them to the glazed-over public. Thankfully, Nintendo have put in a fair bit of effort in not only showing off the MotionPlus, but also in making a worthy sequel to Wii Sports, with a couple of good new sports and enough refinements to the whole package to make it feel fresh. As for the MotionPlus itself, we’ll just have to wait to see what everyone else will do with it, but Nintendo have at least shown that the device can be used for good instead of evil. It’s a shame, though, that half the games here are pointless and will just sit there caking up a fine layer of dust – just like your typical Wii console before this game [/troll again], or your garden variety Nickelback album in a better world than ours.

If only Nintendo put as much polish on the other half of this game, then it certainly would have received more than 7 out of 10.